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The purpose of this document is to provide Cisco Prime
™ LAN Management Solution (LMS) customers guidance and recommendations to help ensure a smooth transition to
Cisco Prime Infrastructure. This document will help CiscoWorks and Cisco Prime LMS customers understand the value and implications of Cisco Prime Infrastructure:

While Cisco Prime Infrastructure will not have feature parity with Cisco Prime LMS, existing LMS customers are highly encouraged to evaluate Cisco Prime Infrastructure, explore its capabilities, and begin devising a migration plan, for several reasons:

• Its functionality will expand to replace Cisco Prime LMS for wired campus and branch network management of Cisco devices. As such, new features will be developed for the Cisco Prime Infrastructure platform only.

• It saves on operational and capital expenses through a more scalable system - up to 18,000 devices per server and improving to a capability to visualize more than 500,000 devices per system with upcoming releases.

• It raises operational productivity with automation and new out-of-the-box network services support such as Plug-and-Play technology, advanced configuration templates, and Cisco ScanSafe, Cisco IOS Zone-based Firewall, and VPN provisioning.

• It facilitates more effective and sustainable integration and data-mining strategies through extensible REST-based APIs.

Transition Planning

Cisco recommends all LMS customers to install and explore Cisco Prime Infrastructure to understand its capabilities relative to the capabilities of Cisco Prime LMS. Prior to migrating over to Cisco Prime Infrastructure, Cisco Prime LMS customers should perform a transition assessment in three major categories: features, devices, and deployment.

Feature Assessment

Cisco Prime Infrastructure's objective is to advance today's IT operational and productivity capabilities. As such, each Cisco Prime LMS feature was reevaluated for usefulness, usability, and practical value. The
Cisco Prime Infrastructure LMS Functional Support Reference document will help customers quickly assess which LMS features will transition to Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

Cisco Prime LMS 4.X customers are license entitled to concurrently deploy Cisco Prime Infrastructure as a separate virtual machine or physical appliance. To help facilitate a smooth transition, Cisco recommends deploying Cisco Prime Infrastructure initially in a non-production capacity to assess its capabilities, while continuing to use Cisco Prime LMS for production activities. Then, begin systematically transitioning their LMS functional activities and operational workflows to Cisco Prime Infrastructure until they can decommission the LMS servers.

Data migration scripts are provided for LMS 4.2.x that will facilitate its ability to share device list and credential information with Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Other, significant LMS 4.2.x user data will be archived and made available as offline backup data on the Cisco Prime Infrastructure server for easy access. Once all dependent LMS features are supported in Cisco Prime Infrastructure, LMS servers can be decommissioned.

LMS 2.x and 3.x customers wishing to preserve their existing LMS user data, must first migrate to LMS 4.2, and then utilize the LMS 4.2.x data migration scripts to migrate to Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

Cisco encourages customers to reach out to their authorized Cisco Channel Partner or Cisco account team if there are questions, concerns, or requests regarding the status or implementation plans of specific Cisco Prime LMS features or if migration assistance is needed. For Cisco Prime LMS power users, a detailed feature-by-feature roadmap can be provided upon request.

Device Support

Cisco Prime LMS has, over its years, diligently picked up support for a very large number of Cisco network devices. Customers have grown to trust Cisco's ability to provide Day-1 device support, helping enable them to take advantage of new Cisco platforms and software releases without fear of manageability or operational gaps. Cisco Prime Infrastructure will continue this initiative with an improved Day-1 device support program and help to ensure that active devices being managed by Cisco Prime LMS 4.2.2 will be supported within the upcoming releases of Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

Cisco advises customers to review the
Cisco Prime Infrastructure Supported Devices information to assess the specific level of functional support available for active devices in the current releases of Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Devices supported in LMS 4.2.2 that are not listed but are currently active, that is, not yet in the end-of-software-maintenance stage of the end-of-life process, are expected to be supported in upcoming releases of Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Cisco Prime Infrastructure will manage non-active, non-supported Cisco devices as "generic" devices, providing basic discovery, inventory collection, health and event monitoring, and reporting when possible.

Again, please reach out to your authorized Cisco Channel Partner or Cisco account team to address any questions, concerns, or device support requests.

Deployment Scenarios

Cisco understands the operations impact whenever a significant change, such as the effort to reinstall, reintegrate, reengineer, and retrain, is made to process heavy tools like network management systems. While the transition to Cisco Prime Infrastructure will not completely avoid this effort, the product was developed to simplify each of these operational tasks, from turnkey hardware or software appliance options, standards-based REST API support, reusable and portable configuration and monitoring templates, to consistent user experience and intuitive lifecycle-oriented workflows.

LMS supports three deployment models: single server, master-slave for functional scalability, and master-slave for geographic distribution. Table 1 outlines the transition considerations for each deployment model.